When Sara Singh began mulling whether to teach her third-graders cursive writing, a problem arose: She didn’t know pure cursive because she doesn’t write that way.
After a small debate within her Cory Elementary School in southeast Denver, the young teacher eventually came around.
“I heard, ‘How are they (the students) going to get a signature if they don’t learn cursive?”‘ she said. “And I thought, I don’t want to be responsible for these kids not having a signature.”
And so while she incorporates the looping L’s and the curly Q’s into her lessons of grammar and punctuation, she doesn’t ultimately grade on it.
“What’s better – that they can write creatively or that they can perfectly form their I’s and make their loops the right size?” she said. “I don’t want to take away from the writing process.”
As schools increasingly shift attention to the basics in the new wave of accountability, many teachers and principals find that those strenuous hours spent toiling along a dashed line have been cut short.
That, combined with a typing, text-messaging and e-mailing generation, means that an art so many people remember vividly could be going by the wayside.
“The computers happened to cursive,” said Veronica Benavidez, principal at Denver’s Remington Elementary School, where the older children are asked to type final papers. “It certainly happened to my cursive.”
In many schools across the metro area, third- and fourth- grade teachers spend little time teaching formal cursive, and by the time the kids get older, it’s not required at all.
On both Colorado Student Assessment Program tests and the SATs, cursive is not required – only that the writing is legible.
“In the last five years, I think there are more demands in other areas, and some things tend to be pushed aside,” said Bromwell Elementary fourth-grade teacher Andrea Lewis.
“I write all my assignments on the board in cursive, and every once in a while I’ll have a student who can’t read it. … A lot of times I’ll just read it to them.”
Handwriting expert Kate Gladstone said the stress on cursive is a waste of time. Five hundred years ago, cursive was more of a hybrid print compared with what it is today, she said.
“If I was going to invade a country and make a child hate school, this is what I would teach them,” said Gladstone, who lives in New York and teaches handwriting nationally to children and adults. “The most legible handwriters don’t tend to write in cursive … but they have a semijoined style; it looks like cursive, and it looks like printing.”
Beth Ellsworth, a Denver mother of two, compared her elementary-age daughter’s handwriting to “chicken scratch.”
“I know the focus on expression and creativity is much more important than whether the tail of the L touches the bottom line,” Ellsworth acknowledged. “But I believe good, neat handwriting is important. It’s like wearing clean clothes.”
Denver Public Schools’ chief academic officer, Jaime Aquino, said he believes cursive should be taught but that students should not be punished for opting to print.
“I always had particular issues with that,” said Aquino, who is a printer. “I don’t think we need to force it on anyone.”
The lack of attention on handwriting does trickle up, though, as kids get older, said high school teacher Celeste Archer.
Just last year, Archer began noticing that some of her students had atrocious handwriting.
“It’s not an indicator of their intelligence. But they don’t write anymore. My 3 1/2-year-old is already being trained on a computer,” said Archer, who teaches at Denver’s East High School. “I do wish they did more of it before they got to me, though.”
Staff writer Allison Sherry can be reached at 303-954-1377 or asherry@denverpost.com.
